House committee wrong on gun-running story

To the Editor:
We learned last week from Syracuse-area Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle that Congress's investigation of the botched ''Fast and Furious'' gun sting operation was her constituents' top concern. ''Every time I'm home,'' she said, ''it is the issue first and foremost in the minds of my constituents.''

While her claim strains credulity (The economy? Health care? Hydrofracking?), the gun operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has grabbed national headlines. Yet it turns out that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa and on which Buerkle serves, has gotten this story all wrong.

A six-month investigation by Fortune magazine revealed that the ATF did not authorize or engage in ''gun walking'' (deliberately letting guns fall into the hands of Mexican criminals) after all. In fact, ATF agents were doing everything possible to try and bring prosecutions. According to the article, ATF agents ''were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.'' These cases were ''hard to prove and unrewarding to prosecute, with minimal penalties attached.''

In fact, this tragic story is the logical conclusion of the National Rifle Association's 30-year war against the ATF to hobble the agency charged with administering the nation's gun laws. No other federal law enforcement agency has had to function under such relentless attacks.

A 1981 NRA-produced film called ''It Can Happen Here'' depicted ATF agents as ''Nazi Gestapos'' and ''jack-booted fascists.'' Rep. John Dingell, then an NRA board member, called ATF agents ''knaves and rogues,'' saying ''I think they are evil.'' NRA demonization of the ATF reached a fever pitch in the 1990s when it charged the ATF with murder and the persecution of innocent citizens - criticism fanned because of the ATF's role in the raid on the Branch Davidian cult in 1993 (four ATF agents were killed and 20 wounded).

NRA newspaper ads said that the ATF ''deserves public contempt.'' Rep. Harold Volkmer, also an NRA board member, called the ATF a ''Rambo-rogue law enforcement'' agency. Radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy counseled his listeners to fire ''head shots'' at ATF agents who approached them because the agents ''got a vest underneath.'' These vituperative attacks subsided only after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which ATF agents died. That attack occurred just weeks after NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre called the ATF ''jack-booted government thugs . . . wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm-trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens'' in a fundraising letter.

The NRA has also worked relentlessly in Congress to reduce the ATF's size, authority and operations. The agency is barred, by law, from inspecting gun dealers more than once a year (even for previous law-breakers). It is also barred from maintaining computerized gun trace records; even today, gun traces must be done by hand from paper records. Further, the law does not require gun dealers to take inventory or log guns that are unaccounted for. A measure to require gun dealers to report multiple long gun sales was beaten back by NRA muscle. For the last six years, the ATF has operated without a permanent agency head, thanks to NRA obstruction tactics.

According toThe Washington Post, in 1972 the ATF had 2,500 agents. By comparison, the DEA had 1,500, the U.S. Marshals 1,900, and the FBI 8,700. In 2010, the DEA had 5,000 agents, federal marshals numbered 3,300 and the FBI 13,000. The ATF still has 2,500 agents, with only 600 personnel to inspect 115,000 gun dealers. On average, a dealer is inspected once every 10 years.

No wonder that the 10,000 gun dealers along the Mexican-U.S. border constitute a Mexican drug gang arms bazaar. As the ATF recently reported, of the 99,000 guns recovered by the Mexican government from 2007-2011 and submitted for tracing, over 68,000 (70 percent) came from the United States. If Rep. Buerkle and Chairman Issa are genuinely concerned about the 2,000 guns allegedly ''walked'' into Mexico, shouldn't they be even more concerned with the ''walking'' of hundreds of thousands of guns into Mexico, thanks to NRA-orchestrated policies that keep the ATF from doing its job?

Robert J. Spitzer is Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Political Science Department at SUNY Cortland. He is the author of four books on gun policy, including ''The Politics of Gun Control.''